​

Camping, fishing and dog walks. Our first trip of the year and we knew that the tick populations were high but we've never had a tick on our dogs. Still Gary had been checking them each night and Saturday night he found one of the nasty little blood suckers on our Jack Russell"s neck. She is 12 and a half years old but that doesn't mean she's mellow. Patch does not look kindly on any attempts that might be vaguely defined as veterinary. As soon as Gary parted the hair to see the tick, she was suspicious. We weren't sure how to remove it but didn't panic since it was pretty happy where it was. I googled tick removal and it seemed that the best method was to pull it off with tweezers. Fortunately our camping buddies had tweezers and the next problem was how to keep all of our fingers while we removed the tick. I got cheese from the fridge and while I "tempted" Patch with it by holding it just out of reach, Gary managed to pull the tick out. Somehow it fell from the tweezers onto the rug by the chair. After searching, Gary did find it. Then he wanted to "torch" it; ticks don't just curl up and die because you pull them off. Holding the tweezers in one hand and an wooden farmer match in the other, he applied the flame. Again the tick fell onto carpet. There was a major arachnid hunt accompanied by colourful vocabulary. The tick had disappeared. This morning, Gary discovered another tick on Scruffy, our dachshund-shih tzu mix. He's littler and calmer so the tick was easily removed. Then Gary discovered another one on Patch. Cheese, hair-parting, snarling, snapping. Gary only got a bit of a nip on one finger. This time we knew enough to put the ticks (both) in a zip-lock bag, pending identification. They are double-bagged which explains the blurry picture.